The Marquee Nightclub & Dayclub at Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan casino resort, which opened in late 2010, quickly vaulted to the top of Nightclub & Bar’s rankings of top U.S. nightclubs by annual revenue, tying XS at Steve Wynn’s Encore casino resort, also in Las Vegas, with annual revenues estimated to be in the $80 to $90 million range for 2012. But don’t let those Las Vegas palm trees fool you.
No Matter the Size of the Venue, Big Looks All Around
Since Jefferson Waful, LD for jam band moe from 2003-2008, took over for Umphrey’s McGee LD Adam Budney in late 2008, the band performs in a variety of venues — everything from theaters to sheds and arenas. They can range in size from Oklahoma City’s Diamond Ballroom, with a 14-foot trim and a capacity near the 1,000 mark, all the way up to the 12,000-seat Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park in Alpharetta, GA.
Green Day released three albums in quick succession late last year — ¡Uno! (Sept. 21), ¡Dos! (Nov. 9) and ¡Tré! (Dec. 7) — along with a documentary chronicling the process — ¡Cuatro! — that premiered at the X Games in Aspen, CO earlier this year (now available on CD). After some preliminary promotional gigs, the band’s “99 Revolutions” tour supporting the album trilogy started in earnest with a North American leg in March and April 2013. The band then headed to Europe for shows slated from May through August 2013.
Brian Hugh Warner, the artist behind both the man and the band known as Marilyn Manson, has crafted a daunting persona, and the band’s “Hey Cruel World” tour schedule, interspersed with the “Twins of Evil” co-headlining trek with Rob Zombie last fall, was also clearly not for the faint of heart, either. Launched just prior to, and continuing after, the May 1, 2012 release of Manson’s Born Villain album, the tour legs included Australia (six shows in February and March), Asia (five shows in Japan and Taiwan in March) the U.S. (18 shows in April and May) and Europe (24 shows in 24 cities, May-July).
Mark Payne, lighting designer, director and programmer for Rod Stewart, credits the late Ian Knight, who died in March 2010, for the general concept and set design for the 2011 Rod Stewart & Stevie Nicks Heart & Soul tour.
Es Devlin is best known for her scenery and costume design work in opera, but she has recently lent her talents to the Pet Shop Boys for their Pandemonium tour of North America.
The popularity of the band Green Day has afforded the trio the opportunity to headline and establish high production values. A major part of the production for their 21st Century Breakdown tour is the video element, most of which is controlled by lighting director Kevin Cauley. The other Collie on the tour is lighting designer Justin Collie of Artfag. This is what they had to say about the tour.
“Where do you get your ideas?” The question is trite, perhaps, whether you’re a novelist or a lighting designer, but it gets asked so often because the answer is so mysterious. For lighting designer Paul Normandale, it’s “the most exciting part of what we do” — that outpouring of creativity in the “scribble-CAD-to-fruition” zone. For Coldplay’s Viva La Vida tour Normandale designed the lighting, Mark “Sparky” Risk served as lighting programmer/director, and Justine Cat-terall worked as part of the video content production crew. Here are a few details on how they achieved the looks for the tour.
Some people get themselves stuck in a rut. Erykah Badu is not one of them. Her music bridges multiple genres, she sports an astonishing array of couture and hair styles and she’s not afraid to change the name of her tour or the look of the set two weeks into the tour. The 2008 tour, in support of her most recent album, New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), started off as the New Amerykah tour, but became known as the Vortex Tour to reflect, as Badu reportedly put it, “a swirling cloud of energy that sucks everything into its orbit.”
You don’t have to be that old to be surprised with the fact that George Michael, frontman for the 1980s pop band Wham!, has been performing for more than a quarter of a century. The first leg of his 25 Live tour, which supports a greatest hits album by the same name, traveled though Europe in late 2006. The North American leg that began earlier this year represents the artist’s first live tour in the U.S. and Canada in 17 years.
Visual Light is a U.K.-based design house started by Nick Whitehouse in 2002. Bryan Leitch soon came on board as a design partner. Since then, the two have been working hard to become one of the most highly-regarded design teams in the world. Whitehouse and Leitch continue to collaborate on de-signs, striving to strike a balance between art and practicality. Some of their previous and current clients include Justin Timberlake, Coldplay, James Taylor, Kylie Minogue and Timbaland.